Many organizations frequently purchase or repurchase the same products, such as food, linens, janitorial supplies, medical supplies, maintenance, repair, and operating items (MRO), and the like. In an effort to manage brand requirements (e.g., a breakfast menu for a hotel associated with a particular brand), regulatory requirements (e.g., specific medical supplies required to perform a treatment, dietary requirements for school meal programs), control costs, manage the delivery process, and assure the consistency of supply and quality of such products, an organization may establish a relationship with one or more distributors for such products. For example, a distributor can purchase products from one or more suppliers (e.g., manufacturers, wholesalers, other distributors, farms, and the like) on favorable terms due to the large number of products that the distributor has contracted to purchase on a regular basis. In turn, the distributor may offer relatively favorable terms to institutional customers that contract to repeatedly purchase the same or similar products. As such a customer can be a source of stable revenue. An alternative to such an arrangement is for the organization to attempt to purchase products directly from suppliers, but this can raise the organization's transaction costs, and the organization would be unlikely to have the leverage to negotiate the same terms as the distributor due to the much smaller volumes the organization purchases. Another alternative is for the organization to purchase products from other intermediaries, such as wholesalers, or retailers. However, such intermediaries often offer too limited of a range of products (e.g., in the case of wholesalers) and/or charge relatively higher prices than a distributor (e.g., in the case of retailers). While such alternative arrangements may be workable for some organizations, such as organizations with a small number of ordering locations or a limited geographic scope, such alternative arrangements may not be workable for more complex organizations with large numbers of ordering locations and/or a large geographic scope. For example, such a complex organization may find the transaction costs associated with achieving the consistency in purchasing products to meet the brand requirements, operating requirements, supply requirements, regulatory requirements, and/or quality requirements under which the organization operates to be prohibitively high.
While a distributor can act as a single point of sale for a broad range of products and potentially distribute products from multiple locations, the products offered by the distributor can vary widely from place to place, or time to time. This can be especially true for perishable goods such as produce, dairy, baked goods, and the like, where suppliers often have a logistics-limited ability to provide a product while also meeting quality, cost, and/or temporal objectives simultaneously. This can make it more difficult for an organization with multiple facilities spread over a relatively wide area to order from the distributor, or even a single facility can struggle when product offering fluctuate or become unpredictably unavailable. For example, while the organization may require the same items in each order, the distributor may not have the same item available in each region servicing those facilities. Accordingly, the organization cannot simply place a single order and always know that it will receive the exact product or request that an order covering multiple facilities be fulfilled for each facility due to such regional and/or temporal variations. Additionally, an organization would often need to identify valid substitutes that meet the item requirements and specifications for every item that cannot be purchased and delivered consistently across their entire organization. This can increase the administrative burden of an organization interacting with the distributor. For example, rather than a single part of the organization being responsible for interacting with the distributor, organizations may let each facility take on responsibility for ordering supplies for itself subject to standards set by the parent organization. Aside from the inefficiency of having multiple parts of the organization performing the same task, this can also have other undesirable consequences. In the case of a single facility, employees may be required to monitor and reconcile orders or anticipated orders based on product availability, which can require, in some cases, hours of analysis and reconciliation daily. For example, the organization's ability to enforce purchase contracts and rebates may be significantly impaired by a lack of systems and procedures to enforce purchase commitments and collect data to submit for contract purchase rebates.
As one example, the organization may be a member of a group purchasing organization (GPO), which can represent a group of similar organizations (e.g., hospitals, hotels, schools, and the like) to provide increased negotiating leverage. Such a GPO can negotiate with distributors and/or suppliers for lower prices, discounts, rebates, and the like, for its members. While the organization itself is likely aware of this relationship with the GPO, each facility may not be, and therefore may not take advantage of the prices, discounts, and/or rebates negotiated by the GPO. This can result in some facilities having unnecessarily high costs. Similarly, the organization can directly negotiate with a distributor and/or supplier for a price reduction or discount on a particular product, but individual facilities may not be aware of such negotiations. For example, the organization can establish an order guide with a distributor that includes a number of preferred items, which can in some cases be ordered at reduced prices. However, individuals placing the orders for items may not be aware of the order guide. As another example, the organization can interact with a supplier (e.g., a producer of condiments) to negotiate a rebate when a sufficient quantity of that supplier's product is purchased. In such an example, the organization may intend to exclusively order products produced by that supplier, but individuals actually responsible for ordering items for each facility may not be aware of the organization's intentions. Even if the individual is aware of the intent, the individual may not recognize why the organization is requesting that they order that supplier's products, especially if the individual ordinarily orders the same type of item that is produced by a different supplier. The sorts of difficulties described above can make it difficult or impossible for an organization to enforce its business model objectives on purchase contract compliance, which can lead to the organization failing to achieve the cost and operating efficiencies it desires.
These situations represent only a handful of the challenges that purchasers, facilities management, and other individuals involved in procurement confront regularly. Across a broad spectrum of industry segments, from food service, to healthcare, to hospitality, to education, to entertainment, the challenges within each industry share many of the above-described general complexities and challenges, and then layer on additional complexities that are specific to the industry. For example, in healthcare food service, it may be necessary to manage nutritional requirements in addition to general product type, availability, and cost. Thus, when layering all of these requirements, from the financial, to the geographical, to the nutritional, to patient care, the process of purchasing, reconciling, and substituting purchases can become extremely cumbersome, if not impossible when time and cost constraints are considered.
Accordingly, new systems, methods, and media for harmonizing procurement across distribution networks with heterogeneous product availability are desirable.